Helpless (Blue Fire Saga) (9 page)

11. sEEING EYE TO EYE

L
ater that afternoon when Leesa was finished with her classes—finished for the week, since she had no classes on Friday—Dominic came by to work with her. He had no sooner closed the door behind him than she began telling him about her dream and how she had used the technique he had taught her to calm herself and go back to sleep.

“I know it wasn’t one of my special dreams,” she said, “but it was plenty disturbing anyway. I hate envisioning that horrible Necromancer. He’s so totally gross and disgusting. Scary, too. But the everywhere/nowhere thing worked great. I don’t even remember falling back to sleep. And when I woke up this morning, I felt great.”

Dominic smiled. “It sounds like you are getting pretty good at it. I think perhaps it’s time we moved on to the next step.”

“Cool.” Leesa was more than ready to try something new, especially after last night’s success. “What’s next?”

Dominic could see the excitement on Leesa’s face. “Don’t get too excited,” he warned her. “What’s next is a just variation on what you have already been doing, but a very important variation. Try doing it with your eyes open this time.”

“Huh?” Leesa wasn’t sure what he meant. How was she supposed to empty her mind of all thoughts if her eyes were open? There was too much to see.

“Go ahead, try it,” Dominic said.

Leesa reflexively let her eyes close as she began to focus on her breathing. She immediately opened them and continued counting out her inhales and exhales, lengthening them by one count each time until she reached her goal of eight. Then she counted back down.

So far, so good, she thought. Now it was time to pick out one inconsequential thing to focus her thinking on.

She looked at Dominic’s gray/blue eyes, but they were way too distracting, so she dropped her gaze to his chest. After a moment, her eyes drifted back up to his face, which remained blank. She wondered what he was thinking, until she realized that was exactly what she should not be doing.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is hard.”

Dominic smiled. “Yes, it is—at least until you get used to it. I would have been shocked if you were able to do it the first time, especially while you were looking at me.” He put his hands on her shoulders and gently spun her around until she was facing away from him, toward her bed and the wall. “I wanted you to try it once, though, so you would appreciate the difficulty. Try again, looking at the wall this time.”

Leesa repeated the breathing part, which was becoming more and more natural for her. When she was ready, she focused her eyes and thoughts on the light brown wall above her bed. She picked out one of the many small imperfections in the paint and concentrated all her thoughts on that tiny spot. She noticed how it was slightly raised, and that it seemed just a shade lighter than the section of wall around it. The outline was irregular, looking a little bit like…

“Well done,” Dominic said from behind her.

“Huh? Why did you stop me?” She turned to face him. “I was just getting started.”

“You were way beyond started,” Dominic said, smiling. “You were there.”

Leesa’s brow furrowed. “Really? How can you tell? You were behind me.”

“Your vibrations slow and soften when you reach the proper state,” Dominic said. “Plus, you didn’t move a muscle for over five minutes. I don’t need to be a wizard to see that.”

Leesa smiled, pleased with her success.

“I just focused on a little bump in the paint,” she explained. “Nothing else, just everything I could notice about it.”

“That’s the trick,” Dominic said. “Just like when your eyes are closed and you pick an insignificant sensation to focus on. Now try it again, looking at me this time. Don’t look at my face—that will come later. Look at my shirt. Pick out something in the material.”

Leesa went through her breathing again, then searched Dominic’s shirt for something to concentrate on. She found a tiny pulled thread on his right side and focused on that.

After a moment, her eyes began to slide up toward Dominic’s face, but she forced them back to the protruding thread. She tried to imagine she was examining it under a microscope, noting every miniscule detail. It was fascinating, how many things you could notice about a single thread.

“Well done, again,” Dominic said.

Leesa blinked, startled by his voice. Just like the last time, she felt as if she had barely begun. She must be getting pretty good at this, she thought.

“Don’t get cocky,” Dominic said, as if he was once again reading her mind.

“Are you
sure
you can’t read my mind?” Leesa asked, blushing slightly.

“Your mind, no. But I can read your face. You looked pretty smug.” Dominic’s voice took on a serious tone. “Beware the sin of pride. A little pride in oneself is good, but too much can be dangerous—very dangerous.”

“Sorry,” Leesa said. “I guess maybe I was feeling just a little bit too pleased with myself.”

Dominic smiled. “Yes, especially since you have not yet done this successfully while looking at my face…or with a battle raging around you.”

With a battle ranging around me?
Leesa could not even begin to imagine that. What kind of battle was he talking about? Magical battle scenes from
Harry Potter
and
The Lord of the Rings
movies began to fill her head. She pushed them away. Baby steps, she told herself. She was still only at the very beginning of her journey. There was a long way to go before she had to worry about any battles. At least she hoped there was.

“Let me try doing it looking at your face again,” she said.

Dominic nodded, so she launched into her breathing again. When she was ready, she focused on the pupil of his right eye. It was smooth and black, with a tiny pinprick of reflected light just to the left of center. His pupil seemed to grow ever so slightly larger while she watched, but she refused to let herself speculate why. She simply noted the change and continued her study. It was no longer a wizard’s pupil, it was just a tiny black dot, slightly convex.

Suddenly, Dominic’s eye narrowed. Leesa’s gaze slipped up to his now wrinkled brow. What had upset him, she wondered? She hoped it wasn’t anything she had done.

And just like that, her concentration was broken.

“Gotcha,” Dominic said, grinning.

Leesa couldn’t help smiling. He had tricked her. He wasn’t upset about anything—he had simply wanted to distract her. And it had worked.

She tried not to be too disappointed. Baby steps, she reminded herself again.

Dominic stepped over near the small sink protruding from Leesa’s wall.

“Come try it over here,” he said.

Leesa limped over beside the wizard. He nodded toward the mirror above the sink.

“Try it looking at that,” he said.

Leesa stared at herself in the mirror. She had never been very comfortable with her looks, despite the compliments she got from other people. She knew people admired her long blonde hair and her startlingly blue eyes, but she had never possessed the confidence necessary to fully appreciate her appearance. Her dysfunctional upbringing had seen to that. Her bad leg hadn’t helped, either. She was getting much better—it was hard not to feel good about yourself when someone as gorgeous as Rave looked at you so lovingly—but it didn’t take much to bring the shy and insecure little girl inside her to the surface.

“You haven’t even started your breathing,” Dominic said. He looked at Leesa’s reflection. “What do you see when you look there?”

Leesa took a deep breath. “I see a semi-confident young woman… and a very nervous little girl.”

“Hmmm…. Do you know what I see, Leesa? I see a very brave and very beautiful young woman. But I can only go by what I’ve seen and heard the past few days. I wasn’t there to see the little girl. I wish I had been.”

“You might not have liked her,” Leesa said softly. Sometimes, she didn’t like her either.

“Oh, I doubt that. Anyone who could grow up to become the remarkable young woman standing here beside me, I’m pretty sure I would have liked.”

Leesa smiled. She turned and looked at the wizard. “Thank you, Dominic.”

Dominic returned her smile. “Perhaps the mirror can wait for another day,” he said.

Leesa shook her head. “No, not yet. I may not be ready to reach everywhere/nowhere here yet, but I want to at least try the breathing part.”

Dominic stepped back, removing his reflection from the mirror. “Go ahead then.”

Leesa stared into the glass, trying to focus on the woman she was today, the one with an amazing boyfriend, a family who loved her, and a very cool best friend. She began to inhale deeply, counting to three before exhaling equally slowly. Next she did four and then five, all the while looking at her reflection. When she reached eight, she worked her way back down to three.

Totally relaxed now, she stared into her own eyes. She wasn’t ready to move on to part two just yet, but she promised her reflection she soon would be.

She turned away from the mirror.

Dominic gave her a single nod of approval. “Nicely done.”

Leesa smiled. “Let me do it with your shirt again,” she said.

Dominic smiled. “Be my guest.”

12. FEEDING

T
hat same evening, Jarubu and Melissa reached the outskirts of the Hartford area. They had fed the night before, up near Springfield, but they were both feeling hungry again. Jarubu had noticed he felt stronger and more powerful since drinking Josef’s foul blood. His thirst also seemed to have grown more powerful than normal.

The farther south they went, the deeper the snow had become. In southern Vermont and Massachusetts, it had finally become deep enough to be an obstacle even for a vampire. They had been forced to leave the cover of the woods and travel in the open along the shoulders of the roadways, which slowed their pace considerably. Whenever there were no cars or buildings in sight, they moved at vampire speed, but when there was any chance they could be seen, they slowed to a walk.

Melissa possessed some slight familiarity with Connecticut. She had lived here with her husband more than one hundred and fifty years ago. He had gone off to fight with a Connecticut regiment in the Civil War, leaving his young wife behind. A marauding vampire had come across Melissa, alone in her home. Enamored with her beauty, he had decided to turn her rather than merely feast on her blood. When her husband returned from the war, his wife was long gone, happily roaming New England with her vampire master. Her master was long gone now, having been trapped and burned by a vengeful mob. Melissa had escaped to the north, where she had eventually fallen in with Maier and his coven.

Much had changed in a hundred and fifty years, of course, but the general lay of the land would be the same.

“South will be more populated than west or east,” she told Jarubu. “It’s much less hilly. Perhaps we should slake our thirst somewhere to the west or east before we continue south.”

Jarubu thought for a moment. He felt so invincible since drinking Josef’s blood he thought it hardly mattered where they fed, but a part of him recognized the wisdom in Melissa’s words. He planned to take up temporary residence in a more populated area, where they could feed whenever they so desired, but it made sense to satisfy their thirst one more time in a place where their handiwork would be less likely to be noticed.

“Very well—west it is, then,” he said. “But not far. Just until we feed.”

It did not take long to find what they wanted. The old, two-story wooden house sat a few hundred feet back from the road in the middle of a large, isolated lot. Lights shone from two windows on the ground floor. The rest of the house was dark. A long driveway led to a detached garage. The plowed drive provided easy access to the side of the house without leaving footprints in the fresh snow.

Jarubu and Melissa moved silently up the driveway, stopping alongside a dark window. Jarubu listened carefully and sniffed the air.

“Perfect,” he said. “There are two humans inside.”

Melissa understood immediately what Jarubu meant. With only two humans here, there would be no chance someone else would have time to raise an alarm when the vampires attacked. The ready availability of almost instant communication via cell phones and the internet was something that had become necessary to plan for in the last few decades.

They walked up to the front door and listened carefully once more. The muted sounds of a television reached their keen ears through the walls.

“Both humans are in the room to the right,” Jarubu said. “Are you ready?”

Melissa nodded yes, her eyes bright with anticipation of the coming meal.

Jarubu placed both his palms against the heavy wooden door. He gave a quick shove and the door gave way easily before his vampire strength. The two vampires swept in through the doorway.

The middle-aged couple inside barely had time to notice the door flying inward before Jarubu and Melissa were upon them, fangs sinking deep into their throats. The vampires drank greedily, but forced themselves to stop when the bodies were only half drained. They let the corpses fall to the floor.

“Break a few things and grab his wallet and her jewelry,” Jarubu instructed. “Make it look like they were robbed.”

Melissa smashed the glass coffee table with her hand and upended a small table beside the couch while Jarubu went to the kitchen and returned with a long knife. Kneeling beside the bodies, he slashed each of their throats into a bloody mess, obliterating the bite marks.

“Good enough,” he said. He hoisted the bodies effortlessly, carrying one over each shoulder. “We’ll bury them in the snow bank beside the driveway. When they are finally found, the human authorities can puzzle over what happened to the rest of their blood.”

Less than ten minutes after they arrived, Melissa and Jarubu walked back down the driveway. They had turned off all the lights in the house and propped the broken door back into place. From the road in the darkness, nothing looked amiss. By the time anyone discovered what had happened here, they would be long gone.